Merchant Adventurer Kings of Rhoda The Strange World of the Tucson Artifacts, 775-900 by Donald N. Yates Section I. Inscriptions and Texts 1. Theodore’s Conquest of Rhoda, 790 (from the Latin) 2. The Whole History, in a Nutshell, 790-900 (from the Latin) 3. Romans Across the Sea, about 800 (from the Latin) 4. Benjamin, Joseph and King Israel III, about 300-900 (from the Latin) 5. Discipline Conquers All, about 800 (from the Latin) 6. They Came to Rome by Sea in A.D. 775 (from the Latin) 7. Jews Calling Themselves Christians (from the Latin) 8. A Hebrew Table of Nations (from the Hebrew) 9. The Death of Oliver (from the Old French) 10. Roland Addresses His Sword Durendal (from the Old French) 11. William of Orange’s Family (from the Old French) 12. No Lineage Matched That of Aymeri (from the Old French) 13. Memorial Stone of a Jew from Italy, about 800 (from the Hebrew) 14. Aëtius, Savior of the Western Empire (Gibbon) Introduction Extraordinary events were taking place in the year 775. Baghdad was the capital of the world, which formed, for the first time in history, an international ecumene, a unified trading zone. At this exact moment, a group of Gallo-Roman traders and Frankish expeditionary forces including Jews from Brittany, Wales, and Gaul called Rhadanites or Rhodanites set sail from Rome’s port to voyage to Egypt, Palestine and Persia, seeking the fabled riches of Terra Incognita beyond India and China. Jews everywhere looked for the appearance of the Messiah: It was seven hundred years after the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Jewish state under the Romans. Now the Holy Land was a protectorate under Charlemagne, the son of Pepin. Commerce was booming. Knowledge and science were about to enter upon a renaissance. The Papal States sprang into existence, to last another thousand years. Charlemagne had just conquered Italy and allied himself with both the Byzantines and the Abbasid Caliphate. The illiterate, six-foot-tall, squeaky-voiced Frank, who adopted the name David and was to go through as many wives and concubines as his biblical namesake, was thirty years old. A steely leader, he had a brilliant career of ruthless conquests and canny political maneuvers before him, one that would make him the first Holy Roman Emperor and earn him the title in posterity of Father of Europe as well as insure his place as the foremost hero in the nascent epic literature of France, Italy, Spain and Germany, the so-called Matter of France, or chansons de geste. Mercantile empires were forming in Central Asia. Revolution had toppled the Umayyad caliphate, replacing it with the Abbasids under Al-Mansur. Baghdad was considered the world’s most powerful and sophisticated metropolis. Harun Al-Rashid would found the famed House of Wisdom there, a research center to rival the ancient library at Alexandria. The Tang Dynasty ruled in China and soon reached the zenith of its innovative and creative contributions to world civilization. Both the Tang capital and their major port at Canton numbered over a million inhabitants within their city walls. By 900, much of this cultural and economic upsurge was gone, erased by the hand of history in catastrophic developments that swept the Christian as well as Arab world and extended from West to the East. As the elderly Oliver in Calalus signed the last entries and inscribed his final surviving words on artifacts exhumed in Arizona more than a millennium later, civil war gripped the Toltec colonies in ancient Mexico. Violent northern tribes wiped out Roman Rhoda in a single day. The Tang Dynasty fell. The Abbasid Caliphate slipped into decline amid success and dissension. The squabbling heirs of Charlemagne tore apart his empire with bloody feuds while murderous bands of armed nobles trampled peace underfoot in city and countryside. The Papacy became a sewer of corruption and depravity, entering its lowest point. Judaism was riven with internal schism and apostasy, while anti-Jewish tendencies swelled to alarming proportions among Christians, to peak during the First Crusade. Viking and Muslim raids laid waste most of Europe. There followed a century, as it has been called, without writing, without recordkeeping, in Western Europe and large parts of the world. Latin decayed, morphing eventually into French, Italian and Spanish, its place taken in barbarian lands by German, Anglo-Saxon and other previously unknown tongues. Climate change buried the Tucson Artifacts under a six-foot mudslide on the Santa Cruz river. Trade ground to a halt and the sea lanes to China and across the Pacific Ocean stagnated and slowed. The new Dark Ages would not begin to lift until after the year 1000, which most of Christendom expected to usher in the Resurrection and last judgment of souls. If the end did not come as expected, the new Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim’s razing of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and destruction of all churches, monasteries, manuscripts, synagogues and Torah scrolls in 1009 sent a thunderclap throughout the West as resounding as the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410. The story of merchant-adventurer Jews active in pre-Columbian America must be understood against the backdrop of early medieval history and cross-cultural perspectives. Although they called themselves Romans, and the first three kings came from France, these long-distance voyagers were part of an international trading world that extended from Far West to Far East, touching points in Arabia, Africa, India, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The founders of Rhoda spoke Frankish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and Slavonic, as noted by the Arab geographer Ibn Kurradadhbah in his famous description of them as Rhadanites. This term can be traced to Rhodes (Isle of Roses), the source of important colonies and all commercial law in the ancient Mediterranean. The present ―reader‖ offers an eclectic selection of texts and documents aimed at illuminating some of the cultural interconnections and economic horizons. Most readings are excerpts translated from Latin, but some are taken Arab, Hebrew, Old French, and even Chinese sources. They range from a Buddhist monk’s description of Fu-Sang, early church councils and the emperor Justinian’s codification of Roman civil law in the early sixth century to Arab geographers and copper plates of Indian rulers in ninth century Kerala. With the notable exception of the Book of Josippon, a prime Hebrew historical source, which was composed in the eleventh century, a good many of these collateral texts coincide with and are contemporaneous with the very time frame of the Tucson Artifacts. Four accounts of the coronation of Charlemagne in Latin sources relate to the year 800, mentioned on the Great Cross. The Carolingian embassy to Harun Al-Rashid and inventory of hostels and churches in Jerusalem come from the same period. So too the charming tale preserved by Notker the Stammerer of Charlemagne’s identification of a Viking longboat in Narbonne, which we reprise here as proof that Breton merchantmen traded in the Mediterranean as well as ships owned by Jews. 1. Theodore’s Conquest of Rhoda, 790 Of the eleven Latin inscriptions signed by Oliver, this one counts as the best composed and most celebrated. The Great Cross was the first of the set of strange ceremonial objects bearing Latin and Hebrew unearthed by chance in 1924 outside Tucson, Arizona and now in the keeping of the Arizona Historical Society. Unlike so much of the evidence for Old World contact and influences in pre-Columbian America, which has to be pieced together and defended with complex arguments, the Tucson Artifacts constitute a self-contained, complete, easily readable and self- proved historical record. The Great Cross happens to have been the first that was found, on September 13, 1924, and there has been nothing like it since. Its discovery was instantly sensationalized in the headlines of the day (see II. Newspaper Reports). Not only do we learn the names and nationalities of the first three “Roman” governors (silvanus, cf. Pima si’wan, English swami) of Rhoda (probably the site of Tucson on the Santa Cruz River), as well as the geographical setting for their exploits (Terra Incognita, a label for North Mexico that persisted on maps until the 18th century), but also we are forcibly struck by the date January 1, 800. Casually mentioned, almost carelessly recorded, and improbably preserved, the information places the events exactly within the context of Charlemagne’s rise to the position of Emperor (Christmas 800) and is consistent with his known favoritism to Jews (called Romani in the laws of the time) and interest in gaining gold, spices and other riches from newly forged long-distance trade connections extending through the domains of the Caliph in Baghdad. All the incongruous, unlikely elements that make the Tucson Artifacts a unique and seemingly dismissible witness to pre-Columbian history are introduced in this brief annalistic text—Jewish and Christian symbols, Roman and Barbarian law, Old World and New World peoples, classical literature and the Bible, military and religious themes. From 1AB. The Great Cross (900), in The Tucson Artifacts (2017), pp. 2-7. To the memory of Romans (Romani, Gallo-Romans, and others): to Brittany (Britannia) and Albion's Jacob (Iago), to that second Aëtius, Theodore (Tudor), and to Israel of the Seine Province in Gaul, consuls of mighty cities with seven hundred soldiers each. A.D. 800, January 1. We are carried by sea. Calalus (Hebrew ―empty, all used up,‖ Hohokam) is Terra Incognita (Unknown Land). The Toltec (Builder Race) governor was as a king ruling widely o'er the peoples (Vergil, Aeneid 1:21).